The officer watching the sensor display gasped when the Zhengzhou, a repurposed light cruiser retrofitted for deep-space exploration, had just finished its transition into normal space, nine hundred light years from Earth. “What is it, Barry?” Captain Xuan Zang asked, straightening from the bored slouch he had been in for what seemed like the past four years of their twenty-year-long exploration mission.

  “Captain, the sensors are reading several large masses moving through the system in unnatural trajectories… scratch that, sir, they are adjusting their course for an intercept.” He said, adding, “Sir, I don’t know what they are, but the sensors are reading them as organic.”

  “Organic?!” Zang asked incredulous, flipping one display on his acceleration couch to display the sensor feed confirming the readings. Shaking his head, Zang sighed, “Well, it’s unlikely to be a great threat, sound a yellow alert and prep the PDS for possible contact.”

  “You think these are space cows like in the old Star Trek episodes?” Hillery on comms asked.

  “Don’t know, don’t care, Hill. As long as they don’t get too close or damage the ship, we’ll leave them alone. Otherwise, we will have to persuade them to stay at a safe distance.” Hendrix replied, his voice holding none of his usual cheer.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much Hendrix, it’s unlikely the things have much experience against something that can break up asteroids like they’re simple dust balls.” The secondary gunner, Idoln, chuckled.

  “Focus people.” Zang barked, then turned to Barry. “What’s their ETA? And can we maneuver out of the system to jump to hyperspace before they get to us?” The captain asked, even as he began doing the calculations himself.

  “Based on my math, they will intercept us in two hours, and we will require another three to build up the energy to punch through the dimensional boundary. Sorry, sir.” He said. Zang’s math agreed with him, but something in him screamed that if they met these space cows, as Hill called them. They wouldn’t be leaving the system.

  “What’s the commotion about, Father?” A woman no older than eighteen asked from the open bridge door.

  “Chun, you should be in our quarters, not on the bridge.” Captain Zang barked, then pointed to one of the empty auxiliary consoles. “Since you are here, strap in and connect to the PDS and be ready to fire on the contacts coming in from our starboard.”

  With a squeak, the young woman obeyed. Pressing a button on his arm console, Zang ordered. “Henry, I doubt it will be needed, but have your marines secure the ship. We might need to do some high-g maneuvering, and the last thing we need is one of the civies getting banged up.”

  “Understood sir, I’ll have everyone buttoned up and locked down in twenty.” He growled back, his voice filled with gravel and a thing of nightmares too many a fresh recruit before he retired.

  “Now we wait and hope for the best.” Zang said, setting a timer to pop up on the main display counting down to the ETA for the unknown organic contacts to intercept them.

  After a stressful hour and a half, where the bridge crew could do little besides watch the timer tick down and the small group of dots representing what now looked to be some kind of space-borne fauna blink closer to their ship. It was then that another dot popped up, followed by what looked like a cloud or fine mist flowing toward their ship. “Barry?!” Zang asked, his dread only growing.

  “Unknown, sir, the cloud seems to be a swarm of… something organic. Each object is the size of a small shuttle or fighter, but they don’t appear to be maneuvering. The thing they came out of is… sir, it’s bigger than anything beyond a small proto-planet. And it reads as organic with the same kind of signature as the other contacts, including the swarm.” Barry said, his voice low and panicky.

  “Stay calm, Barry. I need you to give me your estimate of the numbers and what maneuvers we can do to limit their effectiveness?” Zang ordered with practiced calm. Inside, he was near apoplectic, but he couldn’t let the bridge crew see that. He rechecked their thrusters, both main, and emergency, and he couldn’t think of a way to evade the sheer number of objects that were now swarming towards

  them. It was then that he noticed something. “Hendrix… are those smaller objects reorienting to surround us?” his voice quivering despite his tight control. His hands white as they gripped the armrests of his acceleration couch.

  After several tense seconds, Hendrix let out a shuddering breath. “Yes, sir, permission to open fire with all batteries.” The request resounded through the bridge like a death knell.

  “Granted, weapons free. Launch what few fusion and fission weapons we have into the densest pockets.” Zang ordered, typing in his authorization codes to arm the warheads.

  “Chun, I got ventral and port guns. You take dorsal and starboard, set them to auto-targeting and take direct control of the gauss cannons. Focus fire from those onto dense clusters for maximum effect.” Hendrix barked, his eyes never leaving the console as his hands flew over the controls, finishing by grabbing a pair of sticks that popped up after he lifted his hands out of the way.

  The ship shuddered as everyone of its point defense batteries unloaded into the cloud of organic munitions or ships coming their way. Zang wasn’t sure what they were, but he hoped they were simple kinetic munitions rather than something worse.

  They watched as the cloud of blips melted under the onslaught. “At this rate we won’t need the nukes, sir,” Hendrix said, firing the gauss cannon into another cluster of the vessels. It was then that the giant station began to actually move and disgorge another wave towards them.

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  “Sending three of our eight missiles to hit that behemoth. Three others at that new swarm before they disperse. The last two will be held in reserve.” Zang said, depressing a physical button and launching six missiles in sequence.

  Nothing happened at first, then there was a bright flash and Barry cursed. “Sir, those things intercepted the missiles before they could get close to their targets. They didn’t even make it to the latest wave, let alone that behemoth. Also, sir, the first ships we spotted are twenty minutes to intercept.” He said, then yelled, “Incoming!” just before the ship jolted to the side.

  “Damage report!” Zang yelled even as the information scrolled across one of his screens.

  “Minor damage to the port-side engine. Sir, there’s more incoming.” Barry said as the ship lurched to port. “I’m initiating evasive maneuvers, but the larger signatures are launching some kind of metallic spines at us.”

  A heat warning flashed on Zang’s display, and Hendrix cursed. “Sir, we just lost two of the rear ventral PDCs. It looks like they were slagged by some kind of X-ray laser weapon.”

  “There was a brief flash of radiation from Bandit Charlie. Bravo’s the one throwing spines. No idea what Alpha has for weapons, but I hope we don’t stick around long enough to find out.” Barry said.

  “Engineering, how much more can we pump through the engines? We either boost out of here or we’re as good as dead.” Zang called.

  “Sir, the port engine may as well be slag right now, and we can’t put too much more into the central and starboard engines without either risking the ship turning or the damn engines blowing up. They’re already running at one-hundred fifty percent and have been for the past two hours. They can’t take much more of this, sir.” A gruff and irritable voice called over alarms and shouting.

  “Make sure they can, chief. For all our sakes,” Zang said, closing the link.

  “Sir, they’re coming in too thick. The first of those unknown objects will impact the hull in thirty seconds.” Hendrix warned, even as he kept firing the gauss cannons.

  “Send the likely breach point.” He barked as he opened a channel to Henry. “Henry, we are going to have a breach…” he said, checking the estimated location. “Around deck three bulkhead thirty port-side.”

  “Copy, I’ll have some repair teams standing by,” Henry replied.

  “Send a full complement of marines. I have a bad feeling those things aren’t just kinetic weapons, they’re too slow to do much damage from just mass, and there’s no detectable radiation from them nor are we getting the right spectral signatures if they were armed with chemical explosives.” Zang warned.

  The ship rocked from multiple impacts, and Zang ordered, “Zhengzhou, display cameras at the breaches.” In seconds, multiple screens showed what looked like meaty flowers disgorging giant spiders into the corridors. Moments later, two giant mantis-like aliens followed.

  “The fuck are those things!?” Chun muttered in disgust.

  Zang ignored the comment and pressed the hall-hands circuit. “All hands, we have been boarded by an unknown alien force. Repeat, we have been boarded. Prepare to repel boarders.”

  On the cameras, several of the spider creatures seem to jump away, gouts of bluish - grey liquid exploding out of them. “Zang, this is Henry. I need you to close off the bulkheads at the following junctions!” the old marine barked over Zang’s couch speakers.

  Zang listened as the man rattled off several junctions, closing each almost as fast as Henry could rattle them off. All the while, there were yells and gunfire in the background.

  “It’s done, Henry. Good luck, we should be clear for dimensional transition in…” Zang checked the hastily calculated ETA. “About seventy-six minutes.”

  “We’ll hold, sir,” Henry said even as the urgent yells began turning to pain-racked screams.

  ***

  Henry drew his sidearm and shot the damn bug off a marine’s leg. When the man kept bawling, he slammed the butt into the man’s helmet hard enough to make his hand hurt.

  “Snap out of it. Either start shooting or I’ll leave you to the damn bugs!” he screeched into the younger man’s ear before standing and dragging him as he used his pistol to fire into the coming swarm. The panicking marine thrashed, trying to get away from the swarm, jerking himself out of Henry’s grip. His roll brought him right into a group of spiders, which began tearing into him.

  “Damned fool,” Henry muttered, lifting his pistol and shooting him in the head, ending his suffering. The only good thing to come of his death was the spiders seemed to swarm over a fresh body, thus slowing their advance. He pulled a concussion grenade from his vest and tossed it into the writhing pile, slamming his finger into a recess at the next junction to drop a bulkhead to shield him from the coming blast. The emergency bulkhead slammed down hard enough to make Henry stumble back.

  Moments later, a soft whump could be heard through the thick metal. Henry reloaded both his pistol and smg cursing that he hadn’t recovered Douglas’s ammo. “No point in complaining now. Adapt and overcome, Marine.” He growled to himself before continuing down the corridor, ignoring the sounds of scraping coming from the twenty centimeter thick bulkhead.

  He figured he had about ten minutes left before they chewed their way through the titanium alloy. And he was back to running and shooting. He froze when he heard a sizzling sound followed by the now much louder chittering and scraping noises from the spiders. He whipped around, his weapon up and ready, he hesitated. On the other side of the now-melted bulkhead towered what looked like a two and a half meter tall praying mantis. Instead of scythes, the creature had two arms ending in three-fingered hands.

  In those odd hands was the weirdest thing Henry had ever seen. It reminded him of a super soaker made of cow stomachs grafted onto the top of a giant earwig with a sphincter instead of pincers. As he watched, the organ on top contracted, and the end pointed at him expanded for a moment before it expelled a shining sphere of undulating liquid at him.

  It splashed at the base of his light armor, eating through it in moments before moving onto his much softer flesh. Even blinded by the pain, Henry opened up down the corridor, determined to take out the bastard even as he succumbed to the corrosive substance.

  ***

  Zang grew more and more certain they were all dead as, one by one, the marine and civilian life signs around the breach points went red. As soon as Henry joined them, he patched into engineering. “Prep the core for self-destruct and send out a warning to Earth that this system is a no-go. We can’t let these things get Earth’s coordinates, much less our hyper-drive.”

  “Sir?” the chief asked before barking, “Yes, sir. We’ll launch the buoys in thirty seconds, detonation in sixty mikes.”

  The bridge was silent, save for Chun’s soft sobs. “It’s been an honor serving with you.” Zang said, his gaze pinned to the timer that had just started on the main display, counting down from sixty.

  ***

  Thirty seconds later, four message buoys thumped out of rear-mounted launch tubes. Two impacted incoming boarding craft. Another was destroyed when a high-energy laser melted it. The fourth and final buoy was able to evade destruction and, in a burst of gamma radiation, transitioned into hyperspace.